Love Bites gives a syn­op­sis of the first three all four Twi­light books.

Edit: Katie informed me that the above actu­al­ly men­tions events in book four, which caused me to acci­den­tal­ly give her a spoil­er. Whoops!

It’s a real­ly, real­ly good thing I stopped read­ing after book two. I’m absolute­ly dis­gust­ed!

Hap­pi­ly, the book I’m read­ing to review for TCM is quite good. I’m a wee bit dis­tract­ed by the author’s Very Sil­ly Name–I don’t know if it’s a pen name or if she had cru­el par­ents. It does­n’t change the fact that the book is enjoy­able.

My real-life dra­ma tol­er­ance cir­cuits were total­ly burned out with mar­riage v.3. I’m cool with that. I was able to han­dle much more of it in fic­tion, though I’m not big on whiney char­ac­ters.

I guess the Stephanie Mey­er back­lash is still with me, though, because after fin­ish­ing the fifth of Lau­ra Anne Gilman’s Retriev­er nov­els, Falling Free, I tried read­ing Anne Bish­op’s Tan­gled Webs.

I just start­ed read­ing Bish­op ear­li­er this year, and tru­ly enjoyed the ear­li­er Realms of the Blood books. I did notice that every­body in the books is more than slight­ly high-strung, and that (as is so often the case), good com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills would have large­ly removed most the plot premis­es.

I mean, yeah, evil peo­ple plot, what are you going to do about it? Stick togeth­er and talk to the peo­ple you care about, dammit! Nev­er believe you’ve been betrayed with­out doing some fact-check­ing, at the very least!

But I just got a few chap­ters into Tan­gled Webs, and there they go again. I think lithi­um needs to be added into the water table of this uni­verse.

I’m dis­ap­point­ed, because I do enjoy many things about Bish­op’s writ­ing. Maybe I’ll give that one anoth­er try some­day in the future. For now, it goes back to the library.

Grey­walk­er by Kat Richard­son is next on the stack!

I fin­ished read­ing New Moon, which was much, much more dra­mat­ic (emo­tion­al­ly) than Twi­light. As in, Bel­la goes into a zom­bie state for months, and the book just has blank pages with the names of each month as place holders–October, Novem­ber, Decem­ber, Jan­u­ary, etc. I (and most every­one I know) have han­dled divorce bet­ter than this kid han­dles a teenage breakup! And her par­ents nev­er put her in ther­a­py why? (I think she should have been in-patient, myself.)

I could­n’t let go enough to read this book from the intend­ed audi­ence’s per­spec­tive. I kept think­ing that there’s no way I’d let a child of mine get involved with any­one so clingy. She wants to be with a guy 24/7, and no, I am not exag­ger­at­ing at all. These books are a case study of depen­dent per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der. The fact that they are so incred­i­bly pop­u­lar is wor­ri­some to me.

Yes, I’m bor­ing. I hate try­ing to think of titles for posts.

The girl is off vis­it­ing, hav­ing left yes­ter­day after­noon. Her cat is fran­tic. He is very much attached to HER, not US. So when­ev­er she leaves the house, he goes nuts, gets ter­ri­bly anx­ious, and is cer­tain that she’ll nev­er, ever come back. He spends most of his time sit­ting in the front win­dows or sniff­ing under the front door, try­ing to detect her return.

Shel­ley nev­er freaked like that, but then Katie vis­it­ed Atlanta once a week pret­ty much every week from the time she was a few weeks old ’til they moved here with me. She knew the girl would always come back. And Shel­ley was with me for a year before Katie was born, and attached to both of us. Kioshi is just a one-per­son cat. I should make that a one-girl cat, as he isn’t big on males at all.

I read the first of Lau­ra Anne Gilman’s Retriev­er nov­els, Stay­ing Dead. Fun stuff, and I think many of you would enjoy it. Then I went on to Twi­light by Stephanie Mey­er. Katie was so excit­ed about it that I had to see what the big deal was. She fin­ished that huge suck­er in a day or so. I took a lit­tle longer, but then I was­n’t the one check­ing the library’s hold queue sev­er­al times a day.

I can see why the series is such a huge hit with some teenage girls, but I don’t think it will car­ry near­ly as much pop­u­lar­i­ty with any oth­er age group or males, peri­od. There’s too much “oh, I’m bad for you” angst­ing from the vam­pire (male roman­tic lead). Seriously–he beats David Bore­anz’s Angel all to pieces on the brood­ing, and that takes some doing.

The main char­ac­ter, Bel­la, is annoy­ing to me because she’s pret­ty damned use­less. She hon­est­ly can’t be trust­ed to walk down a hall­way with no obsta­cles with­out hurt­ing her­self. She’s not cre­ative or par­tic­u­lar­ly intel­li­gent, shows no par­tic­u­lar tal­ents of any sort–a beige per­son, in my mind. What’s there to like?

I took a break and read Curse The Dark (sec­ond of the Retriev­er series) before start­ing New Moon, but I did start it. And damn, it’s even more emo­tion­al­ly dra­mat­ic.

I’m not sure I’ll read the oth­er two books when­ev­er we get hold of them (I’m not sure the fourth is even out yet). I know that Katie will, though. The series isn’t writ­ten bad­ly, but I’m way out of the tar­get audi­ence.

There was some­thing spe­cif­ic I was going to post. I know it. I remem­ber think­ing, “Oh, yeah, I want to blog about that!” But I did­n’t do it imme­di­ate­ly and now, of course, it’s gone, gone, gone. Blah.

So, instead, you get a lit­tle hodge-podge update of books and pic­tures.